


Joy Comes in the Morning

by Zakad



Series: All My Ghosts are at Rest [8]
Category: Bleach, Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Found Family, Gaara (Naruto)-centric, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:40:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,365
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26309461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zakad/pseuds/Zakad
Summary: Naruto's life isn't the only one changed by Ichigo and Uryu's presence in the Elemental Countries.Gaara still murders people more than is healthy for a growing child. But having a few people he can't kill makes a world of difference.
Series: All My Ghosts are at Rest [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1319507
Comments: 50
Kudos: 532





	1. Uryu

The first time Gaara doesn’t kill someone he is six years old.

Twilight is creeping over the horizon and the day market is slowly coming to a close. Gaara has convinced Uncle Yashamaru to let him visit the stalls and look over the various wares. Gaara is only allowed to visit the market at the end of the day when there are fewer people and less chance for  _ accidents _ . To be honest, he likes it better that way. 

In his excitement Gaara has slipped away from his uncle’s watchful gaze, in the way only small children can manage even with shinobi guarding their every step, and makes his way to the foreign quarter of the market. The people there don’t recognize him. They don’t try to sell him anything—he’s much too young to have money—but they don’t flinch away from the sight of him either. Gaara likes that too.

Gaara is moving faster than normal. He’s not quite running, but he wants to get there before all the goods are put away so he’ll have an excuse to linger. It still comes as a surprise when he runs into someone’s legs hard enough to bounce.

Gaara falls to the ground with a faint cry. His hands slide along the grit of the road and sting fiercely. Sand shoots forward at the object surrounding it instantly and squeezing. Gaara braces himself against the inevitable outcome.

There’s no crying. No screaming or begging for mercy. It’s enough to make Gaara wonder if he accidentally ran into a tent pole. But when he looks up, his sand is squeezing something person-shaped. That makes Gaara worry if he’s accidentally destroying a puppet. The Kazekage had taken time out of his schedule to personally give him a lecture the last time Gaara accidentally broke a puppet. They were expensive and necessary to the defense of Suna.

Quickly, Gaara decides he hasn’t grabbed a puppet. The sand in his Sand Coffin isn’t moving. It’s squeezing, but there is no give, which means the sand can’t be breaking apart a wooden marionette. He has to pull back the sand with his chakra to make it let go. It’s first time Gaara has needed to withdraw his sand from anything ever, and it takes it him a few tries to get it right. When he does, Gaara gasps.

There’s a person standing above him covered head-to-toe in gray dust. Gaara wonders if it is a puppet after all, maybe one reinforced with chakra, or a disconcertingly life-like metal statue. Then the person sneezes violently and sand spills everywhere. The person is alive!

The person plucks something off his face, a pair of ruined glasses, then peers with a hawk-like gaze down at Gaara. “Are you all right, boy?” 

Gaara immediately starts crying. His hands hurt. But the man isn’t dead or even that mad. Everything is so different from what Gaara knows to be true that he can’t help but cry.

Gaara winds up sitting on the edge of the man’s cart, sucking on a tiny mint candy, and watching closely as the man clean off Gaara’s hands and applies colorful plasters to the scrapes. One is red with cheery yellow smiley-faces and the other is blue with green stars. They’re very popular with civilian children, the man assures him.

By the time Uncle Yashamaru tracks him down, Gaara has learned the man’s name is Uryu-sensei. He’s a traveling doctor and apothecary. He can make teas, cures, poisons, and cloth dyes. But he doesn’t sell poisons in shinobi villages because the ones they need are stronger than what he has. He’s traveling with a friend, Kurosaki, who is out buying dinner. They’re only staying in Suna for a little while. And no, he’s not mad at Gaara or afraid of him.

Gaara is ecstatic about making a friend, even if his new friend is a lot older than him, and tells his uncle all about his encounter on the way back home. Uncle Yashamaru listens and looks worried, but he still agrees to let Gaara go back to the market the next day.

Gaara visits Uryu-sensei at his medicine cart every day for a week straight. He doesn’t get anymore peppermint candy, since he doesn’t have anymore ouchies. But it’s nice to talk to someone who isn’t afraid of him at all. Even Uncle Yashamaru is afraid of Gaara sometimes, though he tries to hide it.

Gaara never manages to stop by when Kurosaki is there, and his sand attacks Uryu-sensei twice more during his visits. But Uryu-sensei never complains except when he can’t find his spare pair of glasses and promises Kurosaki will be back from his errands the next time Gaara visits.

The next time Gaara visits the market. Uryu-sensei and his cart are gone. 

Uncle Yashamaru tries to comfort him and tells him that it’s to be expected, that Uryu-sensei was a traveling merchant, and that he couldn’t stay in Suna forever. But Gaara knows something terrible has happened. The ground where the cart stood is discolored. His senses tell him the sand is mixed with black ash, soot, and odd residues of plants non-native to Suna. None of the nearby merchants will meet his eyes when asks when Uryu-sensei left or where he was going. 

Gaara recognizes the looks on their faces. They are afraid. They are afraid of dying like Uryu-sensei and everyone else Gaara has ever met.

Gaara leaves the market with Uncle Yashamaru. It will be a long time before he tries to go back. He doesn’t let himself cry. There’s no more doctor with peppermints and kind words to take away the pain.


	2. Ichigo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's true that Gaara has lost everyone he ever cared about, but not all of them are lost forever. Some are simply temporarily misplaced.

More than two years later, Uncle Yashamaru is dead and Gaara has sworn to love only himself when he doesn’t kill again.

The hour is late. Not that the hour matters to Gaara, who never sleeps. He is alone in his room, still in the quarters he used to share with Uncle Yashamaru, and staring out into the night when someone dressed in black and wearing a skull mask lands on his railing.

“Hey, are you Gaa—”

Gaara doesn’t let the assassin finish speaking before blasting him off the balcony with a spray of sand. His attacker goes hurtling into the night. 

Gaara scowls at the banister and idly wonders if the Kazekage is going to be using him to weed out the weakest of his forces from now on when a hand darts into view and a familiar mask pops up over the edge.

“So I guess you are—” 

Sand surrounds the assassin’s head this time and squeezes and squeezes and squeezes. There is no screaming, no crunching squelch, no body sagging limply as its brain is destroyed. Confused and a little afraid, Gaara slowly draws back his sand. It’s more difficult than usual. Mother wants blood and this intruder is denying her.

“Ishida was not kidding about the sand thing,” says the probable assassin as he pulls himself up to sit on the railing. Once settled, he removes his mask to reveal warm brown eyes and red hair a few shades lighter than Gaara’s own. “Just checking, you are Gaara, right?”

“Yes,” admits Gaara. He is certain by now that this man isn’t an assassin, or at least not one employed by his father. The Kazekage would never hire outside the village, and everyone in Suna can recognize Gaara on sight. “Who are you?”

“The name is Ichigo. Kurosaki Ichigo,” says the man.

It is the name of a ghost from Gaara’s past. He has tried to forget Uryu-sensei over the intervening years, but like all painful memories, the week of visits to the traveling doctor’s cart resurface in his mind at the most inconvenient of times. The memories of Uryu-sensei are all the worse for being good ones that he can never experience again. 

Gaara’s thoughts are scattered. Even Mother has gone quiet. All he can manage to say is, “Uryu-sensei’s Kurosaki.”

Kurosaki laughs quietly to himself. “That’s right. But if you’re calling him Uryu. You can go ahead and call me Ichigo. I—”

“You’re dead,” says Gaara, cutting off the ghost.

Ichigo’s mouth moves wordlessly for a long moment. Finally, he gathers himself and squints at Gaara with an appraising eye before tentatively saying, “No?”

“I went to the market and your spot was empty. Everyone said you left, but I could feel the ashes from the cart. The Kazekage ordered you and Uryu-sensei killed,” explains Gaara. He feels cold and detached. The desert is always cold at night, but the detachment is new. He almost feels like he’s killing Uncle Yashamaru all over again.

“All of those things are true,” admits Ichigo. “But it doesn’t mean we died.”

“But the Kazekage ordered you killed,” insists Gaara.

Ichigo looks amused. “That doesn’t mean we stood still and let him kill us.”

“You—what?” blurts Gaara. His head hurts and he doesn’t understand. For once, Mother’s silence isn’t making anything better. 

Ichigo sighs. For a brief moment, he looks old, impossibly so, with eyes full of pain and horror that even Gaara can’t imagine. But the moment passes and all Gaara sees on his face is sorrow. “We ran away. Some Suna-nin chased us to the border of Wind. But they didn’t manage to kill us. Either of us.”

Now Gaara’s chest hurts too. His heart is beating fast like he’s angry. But he doesn’t feel angry. He feels...something else, something he doesn’t have the words for.

“Did Uryu-sensei come with you?” asks Gaara.

“No, it would be difficult for Ishida, sorry, Uryu, to come to Suna right now,” explains Ichigo. As Gaara’s face crumples, he quickly adds, “But, he sent you a letter.”

“A letter?” repeats Gaara. He can hear his own voice and it sounds strange, brighter or lighter. He sounds young and isn’t sure he likes it. “For me?”

“For you, from Uryu,” says Ichigo and produces a thick envelope from seemingly nowhere.

Gaara takes a cautious step forward and accepts the letter. Then he backs away, keeping one eye on Ichigo, who looks wistful but not angry or sad as Gaara moves out of grabbing range.

Gaara opens the envelope and pulls free the contents. He barely catches the protective amulet that slips from between the pages of messy scrawl.

The cloth is bright red and painted with the characters for protection. When he lifts the amulet closer to examine the pattern—an unusual golden criss-cross instead of the typical flowers or waves—he catches the fresh, cool scent of peppermint oil. 

Gaara has never seen, or smelled, an amulet quite like this one before. But the colors remind him of that first, cheerful plaster Uryu-sensei gave him, and he decides he likes it immediately.

“What do I do with it?” asks Gaara cupping the amulet in his palm.

“I guess you don’t have a wallet or a _mobile_ ,” muses Ichigo. Gaara silently repeats the foreign word. “Usually you keep it on you or on something you carry around frequently.”

Gaara imagines tying the amulet to his gourd of sand. The bright red would stand out against the pale gourd but the sand moves really fast sometimes. The amulet might get torn up.

“I’ll turn it into a necklace,” Gaara announces. Then he sits down to read his letter.

It takes a long time for Gaara to read the whole thing. Uryu-sensei wrote the letter in several stages, first apologizing for leaving so abruptly, then talking a bit about his time traveling with Ichigo, and finally explaining that he had taken a job in a busy hospital. Not a single word blames Gaara for what happened, even though they all know getting close to Gaara is what put Uryu-sensei and Ichigo in danger. The letter ends with a sincere wish to meet again in the future.

“Uryu-sensei wants to see me again?” questions Gaara when he’s finished reading. He has a feeling that letters end that way as a formality, but he’s too afraid to ask if Uryu-sensei is just being polite.

“Of course,” says Ichigo easily as if Gaara isn’t a monster no one but Mother could ever love or care about. “It’s just a bit complicated because of the whole…” Ichigo waves a hand vaguely in the direction of the Kazekage’s residence. “That’s why he sent such a long letter. Would you like to send one back?”

Gaara wants to write a letter back so much he could burst, but he doesn’t know what to say. Ichigo assures Gaara that he can write anything he wants, Uryu will be glad to read whatever Gaara puts on paper, but that Ichigo should probably come back for it later since Gaara’s uncle will eventually notice if Ichigo hangs around the entire time.

Gaara stares at Ichigo in sheer confusion. Then Gaara _remembers_ because somehow he has managed to _forget_ , for just a moment, what happened to Uncle Yashamaru, what his uncle did, and how Gaara killed him. The sorrow sweeps over him like a sandstorm, Mother’s rage finally exploding into life after being ignored for so long. 

When Gaara comes back to himself, he realizes he’s sitting in Ichigo’s lap and crying. Ichigo is gently stroking Gaara’s hair and whispering condolences that sound much more sincere than Mother’s ever have. 

Ichigo doesn’t look injured. But Gaara knows he unleashed his sand. In the few minutes he forgot himself, Gaara destroyed his room and Uryu-sensei’s letter. Not the amulet though. It’s dusty and slightly crumpled where Gaara gripped it tight, but it came out of the sandstorm unscathed.

“A protective amulet wouldn’t be worth very much if it could be destroyed by a little sand,” laughs Ichigo. “Now, do you still want to write a letter?”

Gaara writes his letter and Ichigo promises to deliver it. He promises to bring a reply too though he’s not sure how long it will take. Gaara says good-bye and tells Ichigo to have a safe journey and doesn’t cry again no matter how much his eyes sting.

Ten months later, when Ichigo brings another letter and a new talisman, Gaara doesn’t feel like crying at all.


End file.
